SANTA CLARA, Calif., Sept. 4, 2013 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Rovi Corporation (Nasdaq:ROVI) today announced that Rovi and Nuance Communications, Inc. (Nasdaq:NUAN) have expanded their relationship to advance voice activated guidance and content discovery applications for digital entertainment customers across the globe. Nuance has signed a multi-year data licensing agreement for Rovi Video and Rovi Music and plans to integrate Rovi's rich entertainment data for multiple countries with Nuance's Dragon TV as well as Nuance's broad mobile voice and language understanding platforms shipping on hundreds of millions of devices, including televisions, PCs, tablets and mobile devices. With this agreement, Rovi and Nuance are paving the way for service providers, consumer electronics manufacturers, PC vendors, and portal customers to quickly and easily create advanced and innovative services and solutions that access Rovi-indexed data on TV shows, movies, and music via voice.

The burgeoning market for multi-service platforms has given rise to advanced, futuristic entertainment applications on all sorts of devices. As a result, quality voice recognition, natural language understanding and guidance is becoming a requirement in devices from tablets and phones to remote controls and TVs.

"Our research shows that TV navigation and content discovery will be radically reinvented in coming years," said Michael Wolf, chief analyst with NextMarket Insights. "We believe TV and entertainment devices with voice and natural language will surpass one hundred million over the next decade."

Rovi's comprehensive, high-quality data coupled with Nuance's industry leading voice and natural language solutions provide customers with a leading edge in bringing applications for discovering and consuming content to consumers. Rovi and Nuance are helping drive a consistent, cross-platform entertainment experience for seamlessly finding movie and television content or discovering new artists, songs or albums—simply by speaking. Rovi's broad editorial, relational linking and standardized descriptor data combined with Nuance's advanced natural language capabilities enable voice-activated commands to search for and discover content. For example, people will be able to say, "Recommend movies like '42'"; "Show me similar TV programs to 'The Middle'"; "What else is Matthew McConaughey in?" and "Recommend summer songs like 'Surfing Safari by the Beach Boys'."

"Movies, shows, and music are key elements of the mobile experience that span TV, phones, tablets and PCs. And with so much content available, people need an effortless and intuitive way to access what they want, when they want it," said Matt Revis, vice president and general manager, Dragon Devices, Nuance. "By expanding our capabilities to use Nuance's voice and natural language understanding capabilities with Rovi's broad movie, TV and music database, we're able to bring the power of connected content to virtually any device."

"We believe the expansion of our relationship with Nuance extends our role in voice-activated guidance and discovery of entertainment that is accessible from multiple devices via the cloud," said Bob Shallow, SVP, product sales & marketing at Rovi. "Our data and services include media analysis, search algorithms, and recommendation engines that, together with Nuance's voice and natural language platforms, can power innovative applications that take the digital entertainment experience to new heights."

Rovi Video and Rovi Music are metadata solutions that are components of Rovi's robust and extensive entertainment database which is one of the largest and most in-depth of its kind, providing information on celebrities, movies, programs, awards, artists, albums, tracks, genres and more.

About Nuance

Nuance Communications, Inc. is a leading provider of voice and language solutions for businesses and consumers around the world. Its technologies, applications and services make the user experience more compelling by transforming the way people interact with devices and systems. Every day, millions of users and thousands of businesses experience Nuance's proven applications. For more information, please visit www.nuance.com.

About Rovi Corporation

Rovi powers the discovery, delivery, display and monetization of digital entertainment. With innovative technology solutions for consumer electronics manufacturers, service providers, content producers, advertisers, retailers and websites, Rovi connects people and the entertainment they love. The company holds over 5,000 issued or pending patents worldwide and is headquartered in Santa Clara, California. More information about Rovi can be found at rovicorp.com.

Forward Looking Statements

All statements contained herein that are not statements of historical fact, including statements that use the words "will" or "is expected to," or similar words that describe the Company's or its management's future plans, objectives, or goals, are "forward-looking statements" and are made pursuant to the Safe-Harbor provisions of the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. Such forward-looking statements involve known and unknown risks, uncertainties and other factors that could cause the actual results of the Company to be materially different from the historical results and/or from any future results or outcomes expressed or implied by such forward-looking statements. Such factors are further addressed in the Company's most recent report on Form 10-Q for the period ended June 30, 2013 and such other documents as are filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission from time to time (available at www.sec.gov ). The Company assumes no obligation to update any forward-looking statements in order to reflect events or circumstances that may arise after the date of this release, except as required by law.